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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest, to which the noble Lord referred, as a joint president of London Councils, although I have to say that it has not briefed me on this and I did not know where the amendment came from. I also declare an interest as the prospective recipient of a similar provision in the Greater London Authority Bill, as it probably just about still is. The noble Lord raises an important matter, although I am surprised that he managed to slip it in at Third Reading without anyone waving yellow or even red cards at him, but there we go. I shall comment on the clause as it is presented to your Lordships. The issue of payments of different types to members of local authorities requires quite a lot of attention. Clearly it becomes even more of an issue as the roles change, but it is not such a recent matter that members have taken decisions that have affected their careers very substantially by choosing to go down the route of public service. I do not oppose the principle that those who have been employed full-time, or pretty much full-time, should receive some sort of severance payment when that office comes to an end. However, the noble Lord limits the provision in a number of ways. First, it is limited to members holding certain positions. We discussed at earlier stages of the Bill the difficulty of those who chair, for instance, an overview and scrutiny committee being perceived as less important than those in an executive position. I would not like to see a severance scheme that did not allow for full consideration of the range of involvement in local government, although I appreciate that the amendment would not set up such a scheme but would provide a framework to enable a scheme to be drawn up. Secondly, I do not know whether, in the noble Lord’s mind, the failure to be re-elected includes failure because of deciding not to re-stand. As I understand it—I may have got this a bit wrong; I hope that your Lordships will forgive me if I have, but the principle applies—the scheme that applies to Members of Parliament was changed when it became clear that some MPs, who did not want to continue but who did not want to lose out on the severance payment, stood in a hopeless seat. That is not a good situation to have. The scheme that has been worked up and which is likely to apply following the enactment of the Greater London Authority Bill extends beyond those who have failed to be re-elected in the normal sense of the word. Perhaps I should have put this in the first category, but there are also members who are re-elected as councillors but who do not go into the cabinet—they do not have an executive position. The noble Lord may not be aware of my final point—taxation—over which the Greater London Authority has just stumbled. Although some of us think that public service feels very much like employment, it is not treated as employment. Therefore it does not have the same exemption for the first £30,000 of redundancy pay as employment does. If you are a Member of Parliament, a Member of the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish Parliament, special provisions apply and I hope that similar ones will apply in London. I also hope that in due course they will be looked at as applying to council officers, because despite this being the last knockings of the Bill, the noble Lord raises an important point.